WE
THE MEDIAWith the FCC leaning toward
relaxing regulations on ownership of TV and radio stations
and newspapers, expect more consolidation of media properties
into a few huge corporations—and less diversity of content
and viewpointBy Neil Hickey

The
Federal Communications Commission whacked a hornet’s nest
with a stick on Sept. 23, 2002, when it announced that it
would take a hard look at all of its controversial rules
on media ownership. On that day, Michael Powell, the commission’s
chairman, invited comments from the public about who can
own what and how much in the media business. Instantly,
the hornets began to swarm. By the deadline for submissions,
Feb. 3, oceans of legal briefs had poured in from unions,
trade associations, consumer activists, think tanks, academicians;
the Newspaper Association of America, National Association
of Broadcasters, Newspaper Guild, National Organization
for Women, Sony, American Federation of Television and Radio
Artists, National PTA, American Psychological Association,
National Association of Hispanic Journalists, United Church
of Christ, and roughly 13,000 other groups and individuals.

All of them pointed out, in differing ways, that the FCC
was embarking on nothing less than the most massive reexamination
of media-ownership rules in the agency’s history, and that
the outcome could have the most profound effects on how
Americans get their news and information. Many of them argued
that loosening the rules would cause a far greater concentration
of media power in the hands of fewer and fewer huge companies—even
more concentration than already exists—and the withering
away of competition and diversity of viewpoints. Powell
said that he and his fellow commissioners would review all
the comments and evidence and hand down the new rules in
late spring. And so the battle was joined, growing louder
through the fall and winter.

While the FCC chief wanted to hold only two public hearings,
in New York City and Richmond, Va., on the rule change,
Democratic commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael
Copps organized additional meetings in Seattle, San Francisco,
Los Angeles, and Durham, N.C., to ensure greater public
involvement. Over the past few months, the opposition to
the proposed rule changes has steadily gathered momentum,
binding together a broad and diverse group of allies. The
last round of public hearings in San Francisco and Los Angeles,
on April 26 and 27, attracted a large number of both ordinary
citizens and activists speaking out passionately against
media consolidation.

Thus far, there is little indication that Powell (son of
Secretary of State Colin Powell) has changed his mind. Over
the same weekend, he told the Newspaper Association of America
convention that the FCC plans to remove the cross-ownership
ban preventing newspapers from owning radio and TV stations
in the same area. But with the FCC decision due on June
2, the fight over the future of U.S. media is growing ever
more urgent with each passing day.

And
the lines have been drawn. It is a strange battle, in a
way, pitting journalists against their bosses, breaking
up old alliances, and gathering momentum as the day of reckoning
approaches.

In mid-January, Sen. John McCain [R-Ariz.], the new chairman
of the Senate Commerce Committee, grilled all five FCC commissioners
about the “monumental decisions” they were about to make
that “will shape the future of communications forever.”
A Democratic senator, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, called
for more voices in the nation’s media, but not from “one
ventriloquist.” A passionate, daylong seminar was held at
Columbia Law School (“the most important meeting taking
place anywhere in America today,” commissioner Michael Copps
told the symposiasts). In late February, the FCC held a
hearing of its own in Richmond, Va., followed by two others
(at the University of Washington and Duke University) organized
by Copps personally. Copps, a Democratic appointee, complained
that the policy review was moving too fast, and that the
issues should be ventilated far more publicly before any
decisions were made. Powell sternly disagreed, saying that
“you don’t need a 19th-century whistle-stop tour to hear
from America.”

Powell has regularly pointed out that reviewing the rules
is no pet project of his own, but was mandated by the Telecommunications
Act of 1996 (signed by President Bill Clinton), requiring
him to reexamine FCC regulations every two years and get
rid of the dead wood. Also, the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the D.C. Circuit has ordered the FCC to justify several
of the rules or junk them.

Still, Powell’s own view (“validate or eliminate” has been
his cry) is that much ownership regulation no longer makes
sense because it dates from the era when channels of information
were scarce. Now, cable, the Internet and direct-broadcast
satellites are commonplace. His legal adviser, Susan Eid,
puts it this way: “The chairman has long since advocated
that, if you’re going to do an honest evaluation of the
rules, you have to look at the marketplace as it exists
today, not how it looked 30 or 40 years ago when we had
black-and-white TV, no remote control, and three choices
of TV programs.” The presumption is on repeal of the rules,
she says, unless hard evidence proves they serve the public
interest.

Powell has been at pains to reassure his critics that he
plans no scorched-earth policy that would lay waste to all
regulation. But defenders of the public interest—Consumers
Union, Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Digital
Democracy, and many others—fear that the FCC, with its GOP
majority (three Republicans, two Democrats), will predictably
facilitate Big Media’s yen for the “efficiencies,” the “synergies,”
and bottom-line values that come with gigantism. They fear
those values will prevail at the expense of what’s best
for people who want to know what’s going on in the world.
Those advocates were not reassured in October when the FCC
released 12 new elaborate studies of the media marketplace
that, in total, suggested that media consolidation isn’t
such a bad idea. The consumerists countered that the studies
were tainted and tilted, and that they telegraphed the commission’s
hidden intentions to favor Big Media at the expense of the
public when the time comes to change the rules.

One
of the most conten-tious of the FCC regulations forbids
a single company to own a newspaper and a television station
in the same community. The Newspaper Association of America,
whose member papers account for almost 90 percent of U.S.
daily circulation, is ferociously campaigning to exterminate
that rule. The 27-year-old ban is so archaic that it should
end “without further comment or analysis,” says the NAA’s
brief, because a mountain of evidence proves that cross-ownerships
improve the quality and quantity of news and public affairs
reporting without posing any real threat to competition
and viewpoint diversity.

John Sturm, president of the NAA, recalls that the cross-ownership
rule was born in a different world a quarter-century ago,
and that “whatever it was designed to prevent or remedy
is irrelevant now.” He points to 40 communities in the United
States that have cross-ownerships (which existed before
the rule, or got special waivers). No harm, he insists,
has come to the public in those markets. “Our opponents’
arguments are all theoretical—no data, just words. ‘Awful
things will happen,’ they warned. Well guess what? Nothing
awful has happened. What more evidence do we need? Case
closed.”

That doesn’t satisfy Linda Foley, president of the 35,000-member
Newspaper Guild, who fires from the opposite battlement:
More cross-ownerships means jobs will be lost, and news
consumers will receive a more homogenized diet of news and
opinion. “The biggest impact is that we would have fewer
and fewer people on the local level deciding what the news
agenda is,” Foley says. The NAA-Guild difference of opinion
dramatizes an unbridgeable chasm: The owners of newspapers
generally want the ban lifted and the journalists who work
for those papers generally don’t. Reporters, columnists,
and editorial writers—predictably—tend to think it’s an
unwise career move to publicly oppose their bosses’ position
on the matter, which may be why journalists have mostly
failed to inform Americans about what’s at stake here.

A few do speak out. At Knight Ridder’s Philadelphia Inquirer,
Henry Holcomb, a business writer, told CJR he worries about
a corporate mentality that may try to “squeeze as many dollars
as possible” out of a newspaper/TV combination and “blur
all of the distinctive ways we try to stimulate and inform
the public.” Would TV people who acquired a newspaper be
respectful of what they don’t know about newspapering, he
wonders? Will they understand the subtleties of print culture?

One voice in the wilderness among newspaper proprietors
is Frank Blethen, publisher of The Seattle Times,
whose family has controlled the paper for generations. “Our
opposition to cross-ownership runs against our own business
interests,” he says. Repeal of the rule would substantially
increase the value of the Times. “It would eliminate
a competitor and give us more control over the marketplace.
If that’s all we cared about, we’d be for it.”

But he’s sure that these clusters don’t produce good journalism.
“The Blethen family could benefit financially from repeal
of cross-ownership,” he says, “but I guarantee you that
the citizens of Seattle would not benefit from it.” Large
newspaper chains and TV-station groups covet these combinations
out of self-interest, not the public interest, he says,
because owning lots of media in one market lets you control
advertising rates. “It’s the public-company mentality, that
you have to keep getting bigger as the only way to drive
earnings, stock prices, and the CEO’s stock options.” Editors
of chain-owned newspapers are mostly silent about cross-ownership,
Blethen says. “We’re creating a whole generation of publishers
and editors who don’t have the independence to speak out
on these issues on behalf of the public.”

As
long ago as 1978, the Supreme Court, in FCC v. National
Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, wrote: “It is unrealistic
to expect true diversity from a commonly owned station-newspaper
combination. The divergence of their viewpoints cannot be
expected to be the same as if they were antagonistically
run.” Defenders of the rule offer evidence that newspapers
and television stations are by far the most popular sources
of news and thus ought not be melded into one voice.

But backers of deregulation are fond of pointing out that
the Internet, cable, and direct-broadcast satellites offer
an array of choices that didn’t exist a few decades ago,
so no great damage is done by losing a journalistic voice
or two in a community. Hold on, says the opposition: Virtually
all of the major Internet sites that people use for news
are owned by Big Media; the editorial content is indistinguishable
from what those broadcasters and newspapers put out. Moreover,
they point out, most Internet users go to the Web for national
and international news, not local. And besides that, the
Internet is not a mass medium, no matter what you may have
heard: Little more than half of U.S. households have Internet
connections, and among minorities and poor people, the figure
is a lot lower.

On the cable side, concentration is already apparent: Two
owners, Comcast and AOL Time Warner, serve 40 percent of
cable households. All of the cable news networks—CNN, CNN
Headline News, Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, CNNfn—are owned by three
conglomerates: AOL Time Warner, GE, and News Corporation.
Direct- broadcast satellites? Two companies control virtually
the entire industry, and recently, one of them (EchoStar)
tried unsuccessfully to buy the other (DirecTV). Thus, most
sources of news are tapped from the same old barrels.

Are
TV networks too big for their boots? TV stations think so.
The 1996 Telecom Act lets media companies like Viacom, GE,
Disney, and News Corp—which own, respectively, CBS, NBC,
ABC, and Fox—accumulate stations to their hearts’ content,
as long they reach no more than 35 percent of U.S. households.
The networks have lobbied furiously to own more stations
because many of those local outlets have huge profit margins
of 40 percent or more (networks make far less), and because
owning them would give the networks more power than they
already have over what gets on the air nationally. To bolster
their push to lift the ownership caps, networks claim that
their owned-and-operated stations produce better local newscasts
than independent stations do.

No they don’t, insist the indies. At the moment, CBS owns
21 stations; ABC, 10; NBC, 13; and Fox, 33. Most other commercial
stations have affiliate contracts with a network, but are
owned by companies like A.H. Belo, Hearst-Argyle, Cox, and
Post-Newsweek. Station groups like those think the TV networks
already have too much influence, and believe that letting
them gobble up more TV stations will give them a stranglehold
on programming—news, public affairs, and entertainment.

The dispute has driven a wedge between the National Association
of Broadcasters (whose board of directors is dominated by
independent station owners) and the big TV networks, causing
CBS, NBC, and Fox to quit the NAB in a huff. Dennis Wharton,
a NAB vice-president, says: “We think the 35-percent cap
has been good for localism.” An influential group called
the Network Affiliated Stations Alliance, which represents
600 stations, agrees. Its chairman, Alan Frank, the president
of Post-Newsweek’s station group, tells CJR: “We
feel it’s important for democracy that we have more voices,
not fewer. Further consolidation is not good for the country.
Our system of broadcasting is set up very clearly as being
locally based. That’s its strength.”

The affiliated stations argue that independent stations
are far more able than network-owned stations to preempt
the network’s prime-time programs when a major news story
of local importance breaks. Still, networks often use sanctions
built into affiliate contracts to muscle stations into running
the network’s menu of entertainment shows instead of local
news coverage.

In September 2002, CBS strong-armed a Florida affiliate
into airing the season premiere of 48 Hours instead
of an important gubernatorial debate. NBC, during the 2000
political campaign, pressured its affiliates to run a baseball
playoff game instead of a presidential debate. (Some refused.)
ABC’s affiliate in Dallas, home of American Airlines, had
to fight the network for a few minutes of airtime during
Monday Night Football halftime to present local news
updates on the Nov. 12, 2001, crash of an American Airlines
jet. But the simple truth is that stations rarely preempt
the network for local coverage lest they enrage viewers
devoted to Survivor, The Bachelorette, and
Joe Millionaire.

As with most of the ownership rules, the underlying debate
is less about principle than about whose financial ox would
be gored if the 35 percent cap were eliminated or eased.
Affiliates (but not network-owned stations), collectively,
haul in tens of millions of dollars every year for renting
their airtime to the networks. That so-called “compensation”
is found money for the affiliates and goes straight to the
bottom line. They don’t want to lose it. Networks, on the
other hand, say they can’t afford to pay it any longer and
have made it no secret that they want to stop. Thus, the
more stations a network can own outright, the more it can
improve its revenue stream, eliminate compensation, and
obviate those pesky preemptions that undermine audience
ratings and advertising income. Hostile guns from many quarters
are drawing a bead on the 35-percent rule; however, the
smart money is betting that the FCC will hedge its bet and
raise the limit to 40 percent or 50 percent rather than
discard it altogether.

Among
the other ownership rules, public advocates are especially
averse to the notion of one company owning two television
stations in the same community (so-called duopolies) and
to letting any of the Big Four TV networks—CBS, ABC, NBC,
Fox—buy out one of the others.

In 1999, the FCC relaxed its rules to allow common ownership
of two TV stations in the same market as long as one of
them isn’t among the community’s four leading stations,
and eight others remain. About 75 such duopolies exist.
For journalists, that often means combining news staffs
and resources, reducing the richness of a community’s news
diet. In Los Angeles, for example, CBS’s two stations share
a news director, and so do Fox’s. In New York, Fox’s two
stations will soon be under one roof. (Since 1995, the number
of entities owning commercial TV stations has dropped 40
percent.)

The NAB argues that the FCC ought to OK these media marriages
because some small TV stations are losing money, and if
they go out of business, the community will lose one newsroom
covering the local scene. In a new tack, the NAB recently
upped the ante and began campaigning for triopolies in areas
where stations are on shaky financial ground. (Viacom’s
president, Mel Karmazin, told a media conference in December:
“How dare they say you can have only two stations in a market?”)
At the national level, far more conspicuous consequences
for news would result if, let us say, CBS took over NBC.
(Viacom, CBS’s parent, once expressed such an interest.)
That can’t happen now, but if the rule is altered, two news
divisions inevitably would become one, giving viewers less
choice in hearing about wars, elections, national policy,
and the Washington ballyhoo. (Meanwhile, Dan Rather and
Tom Brokaw would suffer the indignity of sharing the anchor
chores.)

In April 2002, NBC acquired Telemundo, the Spanish-language
network, and promptly merged the two networks’ newsrooms
in Miami. The assumption, says Herta Suarez, AFTRA’s national
director of special projects, is that NBC will do the same
in cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, where both networks
have news operations. “This will reduce opportunities for
journalists to work,” she says, “and also what the public
will learn.” (Suarez also laments that NBC pays Latino staffers
less than Anglos for the same work.) Juan Gonzalez, president
of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, says
that the goal of giving Americans a diversity of opinions
and analyses “has been virtually forgotten.”

At
the Columbia Law School forum in January, chairman Powell
confessed he is no fan of Congress’s mandate that he review
media ownership rules every two years. It’s “regrettable
and destabilizing,” he said, to go through this torturous
process so often. He added: “There will be rules when this
is done [but] there won’t be a rule that lets one person
own everything.”

That reduction ad absurdum was marginally reassuring to
his opponents, but they hoped he would remain tightly focused
on the crucial underlying principle, that the whole point
of devising public policy is to do what’s best for the people,
not to guarantee corporations their desired “efficiencies”
and “synergies,” which is none of the FCC’s business. As
USC’s filing to the commission put it, the agency’s mandate
to regulate is driven by the First Amendment rights of the
public, not the media owners. Safeguarding those rights
has “been understood to permit restricting the media industry’s
natural desire to concentrate ownership in order to achieve
economies of scale.” Sandra Ortiz, author of the USC brief
and executive director of the university’s communications
law center, says that the once-revered concept of local
media ownership has become “so rare as to be almost quaint.”

The Newspaper Guild’s comments to the commission are equally
unambiguous: “Media owners claim that relaxation of ownership
rules will allow them to realize ‘synergies.’ [But] the
commission’s charge is to protect and enhance media diversity,
competition, and local identity—not efficiency.” AFTRA points
out that media conglomerates, in hot pursuit of higher profits,
customarily put heavy pressure on their newspapers and broadcast
stations to cut costs, with negative consequences on the
journalism. Once upon a time, says the union, broadcast
stations competed for audience by doing the best possible
local news. But media companies that dominate a market have
little incentive to spend money on enterprisers and investigations.
Depriving people of that “is to enter onto a slippery slope
that will leave the public wondering whose ‘truth’ is being
told.”

Allowing further media concentration would be a “tragic
mistake,” says the veteran editor Gene Roberts, now a journalism
professor at the University of Maryland. “Communities deserve
to be looked at with different eyes. Even with the best
integrity and most solid news principles in the world, what
looks like a story to one person may not to another.” Easing
the rules, says Roberts, is “just going to make an already
bad situation even worse. There’s very little news competition
in most parts of the country, and we’re about to have even
less.”

That’s how it looks now, anyway. Five unelected appointees,
whom most Americans have never heard of, will make those
decisions in the next few weeks. If they get it right this
time, the hornets won’t swarm quite so furiously two years
from now when the rules come up for review all over again.

Neil
Hickey is editor at large with Columbia
Journalism Review, where this story first appeared.

You’re
Not From Around Here, Are You?How media consolidation is
killing local news By Paul Schmelzer

Tune into the evening news on Madison, Wisc.’s Fox TV
affiliate and behold the future of local news. In the
program’s concluding segment, The Point, Mark Hyman
rants against peace activists (“wack-jobs”), the French.
(“cheese-eating surrender monkeys”), progressives (“loony
left”), and the so-called liberal media, usually referred
to as the “hate-America crowd” or the “Axis of Drivel.”
Colorful, if creatively anemic, this is TV’s version
of talk radio, with the precisely tanned Hyman playing
a second-string Limbaugh.

Fox 47’s right-wing rants may be the future of hometown
news, but—believe it or not—it’s not the program’s blatant
ideological bias that is most worrisome. Here’s the
real problem: Hyman isn’t the station manager, a local
crank, or even a journalist. He is the vice president
of corporate communications for the station’s owner,
the Sinclair Broadcast Group. And this segment of the
local news isn’t exactly local. Hyman’s commentary is
piped in from the home office in Baltimore, and mixed
in with locally produced news. Sinclair aptly calls
its innovative strategy “NewsCentral,” and it is very
likely to spell the demise of local news as we know
it.

Like many a media empire, Sinclair grew through a combination
of acquisitions, clever manipulations of Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) rules, and considerable lobbying campaigns.
Starting out as a single UHF station in Baltimore in
1971, the company began its frenzied expansion in 1991
when it began using “local marketing agreements” as
a way to circumvent FCC rules that bar a company from
controlling two stations in a single market. These “LMAs”
allow Sinclair to buy one station outright and control
another by acquiring not its license but its assets.
Today, Sinclair touts itself as “the nation’s largest
commercial television broadcasting company not owned
by a network.” You’ve probably never heard of them because
the 62 stations they run—garnering 24 percent of the
national TV audience—fly the flags of the networks they
broadcast: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and the WB.

TV Barn’s Mark Jeffries calls Sinclair the “Clear Channel
of local news,” a reference to the San Antonio media
giant that has grown from 40 to more than 1,200 stations
today thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which
relaxed radio-ownership rules. But the parallels extend
beyond their growth strategies. Jeffries describes Sinclair
as having a “fiercely right-wing approach that makes
Fox News Channel look like a model of objectivity,”
while Clear Channel is best known for sponsoring pro-war
“Rallies for America” during the Iraq conflict. And
like Clear Channel’s CEO L. Lowry Mays—a major Republican
donor and onetime business associate of George W. Bush—the
Sinclair family, board, and executives ply the GOP with
big money. Since 1997, they have donated well over $200,000
to Republican candidates.

Sinclair’s news department also takes a page out of
Clear Channel’s book of nonlocalized programming. According
to Sinclair’s web site, NewsCentral is a “revolutionary
news model” that introduces “local news programming
in markets that otherwise could not support news.” Begun
in 2002, it’s being tested in five not-so-small markets:
Minneapolis; Oklahoma City; Flint, Mich; Raleigh, N.C.;
and Rochester, N.Y. (Hyman’s segment, The Point, however,
is aired on all 62 of its stations.) In these five cities,
the hourlong newscast combines local broadcasting with
prepackaged news. To maintain the appearance of local
news, the Baltimore on-air staff is coached on the intricacies
of correct local pronunciations. Or the weatherman,
safely removed from the thunderstorms in, say, Minneapolis,
will often engage in scripted banter with the local
anchor to maintain the pretense: “Should I bring an
umbrella tomorrow, Don?” “You bet, Hal, it looks pretty
ugly out there . . .”

Journalists have been pondering the specter of centralized
news operations for some time, both because it affects
the quality of news and because it could put them out
of a job. “We should all be conscious of the dangers
that are present when you have one newsroom producing
the news,” says John Nichols, associate editor at The
Capital Times in Madison and co-author with Robert
McChesney of the books Our Media, Not Theirs,
and It’s the Media, Stupid. “That’s a real possibility.
It’s a very dangerous future, but Sinclair is already
living in the dangerous future.”

And that future’s getting pretty crowded with media
mega-empires jostling to “synergize” their operations.
The Tribune Company is already cross-training reporters.
Under the label of journalistic “synergy,” the company
owns most of Chicago’s media outlets: The Chicago
Tribune, WGN’s TV and AM radio stations, Chicago
magazine, the AOL project Digital City Chicago, plus
the Chicago Cubs (not to mention its 22 TV stations
nationwide, 25-percent stake in the WB network, 14 newspapers,
the syndication service Tribune Media Services, and
14 online publications including cars.com and apartments.com).
A Tribune reporter—variously called a “multimedia
reporter,” a “backpack journalist,” or merely a “content
provider”—might attend a mayoral press conference, for
example, armed with a digital audio recorder, a camera,
and a notebook to provide stories for radio, print,
online, and television news. While the debate rages
over whether such journalists can consistently produce
high-quality news, the real fear is that only one voice
will frame and tell a news story. It’s a chilling thought
when that lone perspective is shaped by a Sinclair or
Fox worldview.

“Thomas
Jefferson and James Madison believed that, in order
to sustain democracy, media needed to be cacophonous
and diverse,” Nichols says. “Today we don’t have that.
Our range of debate is getting incredibly narrow: The
mainstream discourse runs from right-wing to far right-wing.”

This sentiment was echoed by David Croteau, Virginia
Commonwealth University professor and author of The
Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest,
during one of the public hearings on the Federal Communications
Commission’s plan to radically relax rules governing
media ownership. “We cannot, therefore, treat the media
like any other industry. Its products are not widgets
or toasters; they are culture, information, ideas, and
viewpoints,” he said.

Indeed, the issue of centralized news will be exacerbated
after the FCC’s June 2 vote on ownership. On the chopping
block are six regulations that attempt to preserve a
diversity of voices and local control of media from
the ban on owning both a TV station and newspaper in
the same market to limits on how many radio stations
one group can own in a given area.

Should the FCC vote to weaken these protections—as expected—more
of our airwaves will be concentrated in the hands of
a few corporations. Currently six companies control
most of the country’s media: AOL Time Warner, Disney,
General Electric, News Corporation (Fox), Viacom, and
Vivendi Universal. A study released in February by the
Project for Excellence in Journalism, which crunched
data from 172 stations and 23,000 stories over five
years, determined—to the ire of major media industry
groups—that “smaller station groups tended to produce
a higher quality of newscasts than networks owned by
larger companies—by a significant margin.” It also found
that “local ownership offered some protection against
newscasts being very poor.”

When talking about media deregulation, Nichols takes
issue with the word “deregulation.” He sees it as a
term used by conservatives to project a false image
of free-market values and small government. In fact,
he says, the recent FCC decisions do not eliminate regulations.
They instead are “dismantled and then reassembled in
a form that allows a handful of companies—like Sinclair—to
get bigger and bigger and bigger.” “We still have a
highly regulated media,” he says. “The only thing that
is changing is that it’s now being regulated in the
interests not of democracy or the people, but larger
corporations.”

The co-optation of words that accompanies the handover
of the airwaves to corporations is proving effective.
Only a third of all Americans realize that the public
owns the airwaves, and about a tenth are aware that
the FCC gives stations licenses for free, according
to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
Equally alarming are the results from the Project for
Excellence in Journalism survey: 72 percent of Americans
say they have “heard nothing at all” about the upcoming
June 2 FCC vote on relaxing ownership rules.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell himself sees the airwaves
not as conveyors of culture but as a commodity. When
asked in 2001 what he thought the term “public interest”
meant in the FCC’s mission, Powell replied, “I have
no idea. I try to make the best judgment I can in ways
that benefit consumers. Beyond that I don’t know.”

Paul
Schmelzer is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor of
the Web magazine Eyeteeth:
A Journal of Incisive Ideas.